Dance Maker Finds His Recent Career Change an Education

Dance maker Richard Burrows uses the latest business buzzwords to describe the choreographer’s craft as “human resource management.” If you accept that unorthodox definition, Burrows’ new position as executive director of the San Diego Institute for Arts Education (an organization that brings the arts to children in the classroom) is a natural evolution for the veteran dance designer, not a radical career change.

“I still choreograph,” he said recently, “only the players are different. Administrators are choreographers who bring resources together, and administrative work can be just as creative and sculptural as making dances.”

Burrows’ choreographic prowess is well known to most modern dance buffs in town through his contributions to Three’s Company’s repertory. But the 36-year-old has also chalked up an impressive list of credits elsewhere in the dance world, as principal dancer and choreographer of the Los Angeles-based Dance Artists/Burrows Worx & Co., the Valerie Huston Dance Theater in Santa Barbara and Utah’s Repertory Dance Theater. He even served as dance coordinator and performer in a Cultural Exchange Program with the Soviet Union in 1975.

In 1988, he left his tenured post as associate professor and administrative coordinator at Ohio State University’s highly regarded dance department and moved to California, where he became development assistant for the San Jose Museum of Art and then associate director of the California Foundation for the Retarded in Oakland later in the year.

Now Burrows is faced with merging his creative and administrative skills in a post that seems ideally suited to his background.

“I don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” he said. “Liz Bergmann (his predecessor) did a remarkable job. She built a program and created the mechanism to make it work. I’m an idea man. I can take her concept and bring it to fruition.”

The institute’s concept, modeled after Lincoln Center’s successful prototype, is more ambitious than just bringing visiting artists into the schools for special performances. It involves a partnership with the teachers and active participation from the students in the entire artistic experience.

Bergmann, an ex-dancer herself, has been at the helm of the organization since its humble beginnings as a Junior League project four summers ago. She recently resigned to return to teaching, but is staying on with Burrows through the end of July to ensure a smooth changing of the guard.

As Bergmann sums up the institute’s approach to arts education, “the key is educating the teachers. We don’t just send artists into the schools to work with the children. We spend two weeks in the summer giving intensive training to the participating teachers, so that they can teach the kids separately when the artists aren’t there.

“Teachers who go through the program are changed by it,” she said. “They start looking at the way they teach everything . The program is really about observing and perception.

“During these two weeks of training, the teachers see the different art forms, and they can request whatever they want to work on during the school year,” she said. “Usually, it’s two or three units a year.

“By the time the children see a performance or visit a museum, they have an understanding of the processes behind the performances or works of art,” Bergmann said. “If they’re going to see a dance performance, they choreograph a dance themselves and tackle the same problems the choreographer is dealing with. It’s not a passive experience, and that gives them a heightened awareness of the art form.”

When the institute opened its doors four years ago, 39 teachers participated. This summer, 145 teachers from about 28 schools and 12 districts signed on.

“We reach 50,000 kids, and the schools are really excited about it,” Bergmann said.

Even this year, with the Muriel Gluck award--which provides schools with free visual arts instruction, as opposed to the institute’s fee-based program, “the schools fought to keep us,” she said. “And we haven’t lost any of those schools.”

“We have a $225,000 budget this year, and we get about half of it from the schools,” she said. “We have to raise the rest, mostly from corporate support.”

Consequently, fund-raising will represent a major part of the new director’s duties.

“Most arts people have no experience fund raising,” Bergmann said, “but (Burrows) has a lot of creative ideas. That really impressed our board.”

The personable Burrows has an idealist’s vision of the arts. But, as he noted, “my lofty talk got Ohio to change its educational requirements. We went to the state Board of Education and convinced them to infuse arts education in the curriculum for the first time.”

He is convinced that “discerning artists also make discerning mathematicians and scientists,” and his immediate goal is to expand the institute’s presence in San Diego.

“Teachers say the dropout rate is less during these institute experiences,” he said, “but we still have to back that up with statistics. If that doesn’t prove out, we’ll find something else. I’m a pragmatist.”

All the same, Burrows believes, “certain characteristics are not definable. It’s about trust. The institute is in a state of change, because the arts are in a state of flux. We need to look at what’s valuable, and we need to keep artists in San Diego.”

The institute already took a big step in that direction this year by commissioning two new works from local artists and continuing to employ many others in the program, Bergmann said.

“We commissioned our first multimedia work, ‘Apollo to the Rescue” (a collaborative effort featuring original music, text and visuals), and we also asked Christine Sevec (of ‘Suds’ fame) to do a solo theater piece for us.”

Among the other events scheduled for the schools this year are concerts by Patricia Sandback and Dancers and storytelling sessions by David Novak. Bergmann has 20 artists lined up for classroom visits in 1989-90.

Burrows says he will bide his time before putting his own stamp on the institute’s curriculum. In the meantime, “my agenda is to meet people--principals, legislators--make the rounds and find out where the resources are.”

Ever since word got out that Burrows was in town, “the phone calls for choreographic commissions began coming.” But don’t count on seeing new works from this prolific dance maker in the near future.

“The first year, I’ll be immersed in art,” he promised, “but it just may not be my own.”